Software AG's new CentraSite ActiveSOA software will finally merge the company's CentraSite metadata management tool for SOA (service-oriented architecture) with the SOA governance tool Infravio that it acquired through its purchase of webMethods last year.

The company currently offers two products branded CentraSite: the Enterprise edition focused on metadata management, and the Governance edition, a rebranded version of Infravio with a user interface resembling that of CentraSite, said Ivo Totev, the company's chief marketing officer.

The new CentraSite ActiveSOA is retains the existing CentraSite Enterprise metadata repository, but incorporates the Infravio governance engine and around 50 other new features, he said.

Those features include standards-based integration with other runtime governance tools and a more usable search engine: "You don't have to go through heavy taxonomies" to find things now, said Totev.

There are also change management tools to make it easier to calculate the cost of making changes to services, and an audit trail to ensure changes have all the necessary approvals, he said.

The new version is already available to some customers through a restricted beta testing program, and will be generally available by the end of the year, Totev said.

For users of CentraSite Enterprise edition, "It's a simple upgrade: the metamodels are the same, and you get new governance tools," he said.

Users of the Infravio-based CentraSite Governance edition aren't forgotten, but will have to wait a little longer for Software AG to smooth the upgrade: "We are developing tools to put the metadata in the new repository," said Totev. Once those upgrade automation tools are ready, around the second quarter of next year, it will take a day or so's work to migrate a system with 1,000 assets and 200 policies, he said.

At around US$50,000 per processor, pricing for CentraSite ActiveSOA will be about the same as for CentraSite Enterprise and around 10 percent to 15 percent less than for the corresponding Infravio product, said Totev.

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